LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE (via Bryan Francoeur):

An Unfinished Life: William Manchester is dead. How will he finish his book? (STEVEN ZEITCHIK, June 3, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

The mid-project death or enfeeblement of an author is one of the stranger crucibles a publisher must face. Unlike more collaborative art forms, a piece of writing bears a highly individual style, making it hard for others to complete a book without it seeming choppy or fraudulent. (One thinks of the old joke where a writing professor asks students to take inspiration from Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist"; they return passages about barkdogs and bahsheeps.) Nor can a company release a book's fragment the way it might a CD; a piece of writing more than most creative efforts is an integrated whole and immune to such partialness.

Yet creative legacy (if not commercial imperative) demands that a publisher find a way to get the book out--whether by hook, crook or séance.

The easiest method is to conceal the changes in the publishing process--i.e., by allowing the editor to interpolate freely. One telltale clue this has happened: an author is in the middle of writing right before he passes away, then, mysteriously, turns out to have completed his book right before his death.

Often, though, the resurrection has a more religious quality. Robert Ludlum died in 2001, but his productivity did not suffer for it. In fact, he has remained a steady presence on bestseller lists, publishing nearly a half-dozen thrillers since then, some as many as 600 pages long. One only hopes for such discipline from the living. (St. Martin's, with whom Ludlum had signed a lucrative contract just two years before he died, employs co-writers to polish "several manuscripts in various stages of completion.")

Death was a similar creative catalyst for V.C. Andrews, the writer of dark teenage thrillers who passed away in 1986 but has written ever since with the help of one Andrew Niederman. Mr. Niederman once said he believed he was channeling Andrews, a belief he seems to take literally--in fact, he even makes appearances at writers conferences as V.C. Andrews.

The most colorful fictional evocation of the practice comes in the cult-novel "Karoo" by the screenwriter Steve Tesich, in which a sleazy producer persuades a script doctor named Saul Karoo to do triage on the work of an ailing great. "[It's] not even a respectable assemblage. It's like confetti, Doc. I swear to you, that's what it's like," he tells the main character, continuing, "If there's anyone who can salvage this great man's last work and let him enter the Pantheon in peace, it's you."

The triumphal portion of Churchill's life has already been covered in the first two volumes, all that remains is the tragedy--we can do without.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2004 10:54 AM